Despite minor role in Senate, Obama's star power rose

Sen. Barack Obama stood before Washington's elite at the spring dinner of the storied Gridiron Club. In self-parody, he ticked off his accomplishments a little more than a year after arriving in town.

"I've been very blessed," Obama told the crowd assembled in March 2006. "Keynote speaker at the Democratic convention. The cover of Newsweek. My book made the best-seller list. I just won a Grammy for reading it on tape."

"Really, what else is there to do?" he said, his smile now broad. "Well, I guess I could pass a law or something."

They were the two competing elements in Obama's time in the Senate: his megawatt celebrity and the realities of the job he was elected to do. He went to the Senate intent on learning the ways of the institution, telling reporters he would be "looking for the washroom and trying to figure out how the phones work."

But frustrated by his lack of influence and what he called the "glacial pace," he soon opted to exploit his star power. He was running for president even as he was still getting lost in the Capitol's corridors.

Outside Washington, Obama was a multimedia sensation. People offered free tickets to his book readings for $125 on eBay and contributed thousands of dollars each to his political action committee to watch him on stage questioning policy experts.

But inside the Senate, the junior senator from Illinois was 99th in seniority and in the minority party his first two years. In committee hearings, he had to wait his turn until every other senator had asked questions. He once telephoned reporters himself to draw attention to his amendments. And some senior colleagues were cool to the newcomer, whom they considered naive.

Determined to be viewed as substantive, Obama kept his head down, declining Sunday talk show invitations for his first year, and consulted Senate elders for advice. He was cautious: Even on the Iraq war, which he had opposed as a Senate candidate, he voted against the withdrawal of troops. He proposed a drawdown only after he was running for president and polls showed voters favoring it.

And while he rightly takes credit for steering through an ethics overhaul that reformers called a "gold standard," like most freshmen he did not play a significant role in passing much other legislation and disappointed some Democrats for not becoming more prominent in other important debates.

Yet Obama was planning for the future. He spent much of his time raising money for other Democrats, which helped him build chits and lists of potential voters. He tended to his image, even upbraiding a reporter for writing that he had smoked a cigarette (a habit he later said he gave up for his presidential bid).

Early on in his tenure in Washington, he concluded that it would be hard to have much of an impact inside the Senate, where partisan conflict increasingly provoked filibuster threats, nomination fights and near-gridlock even on routine spending bills. "I think it's very possible to have a Senate career here that is not particularly useful," he said in an interview, reflecting on his first year.

And it would be better for his political prospects not to become a Senate insider, which could saddle him with the kind of voting record that has tripped up so many senators who would be president.

Obama took few bold stands and diverted little from the liberal orthodoxy he had embraced in the Illinois Senate. His voting record in his first year in Washington, according to the annual rankings by National Journal, was more liberal than 82.5 percent of the Senate (compared with, for example, Clinton's 79.8 percent that year).

He worked with Republican Sen. Tom Coburn of Oklahoma, one of the most conservative in the chamber, to establish a public database to examine government spending after Hurricane Katrina.

But for the most part, he stuck to party lines; there were few examples of the kind of bipartisan work he advocates in his current campaign.

In February 2006, he appeared on several Sunday shows in a row. "People are getting tired of me already," he said in an interview.

In fact, outside Washington, people were clamoring for more. He was received like a returning hero in Africa in August 2006. On a book tour two months later, crowds mobbed him and people urged him to run for president.

During the midterm elections that year, Obama was his party's most sought-after campaigner - he helped raise almost $1 million online in a matter of days that spring for Sen. Robert C. Byrd of West Virginia.

His appearances on the trail helped lay the groundwork for a possible presidential campaign. He earned the good will of some Democrats who have now endorsed him. And most campaign events required tickets, so his staff members collected names and addresses of potential supporters.

Finally, Obama did what he had done when he first arrived in the Senate, quietly consulting those who knew the institution well for advice on whether to run.

They told him that these chances come along rarely. His celebrity was undeniable. And yes he was green, but that also meant he did not have the burden of a long record.

"For somebody to come in with none of that history is a real advantage," said former Sen. Tom Daschle of South Dakota. "I told him that he has a window to do this. He should never count on that window staying open."